Discipline and Tier 16 Bonuses - 8/8/13

First, the obvious: I simply cannot understand why the 4p increases our mastery rating. If the 10% haste was done to compensate the 15-to-10sec decrease in spirit shell uptime, so that we can manage to put 5 or even 6 PoH/GHs into a single SS rotation, why did they give us mastery? Isn't spirit shell getting higher numbers with crit rating (more DAs)? Someone said that some residual healing, PoM bounces and the eventual PW:S we might cast under SS buff will get boosted and yes, that's not questionable, but is it really what we're supposed to get with the 4p bonus? Just a small (total) increase from residual/eventual heals? I can understand why someone said that using SS to PW:S-blanket all the raid is a good idea after all... but then again, spirit shell IMO loses all of it's intended use if we're popping it to increase our PW:S absorbs...

Some more into the 4p bonus: to get it, we need to equip 4 pieces of tier armor (really?!). But none of them have +crit, and all of them have spirit, so their bonus is always spirit+mastery. To every one of the 5 possible tier items (except legs) theres an alternative better raid drop (that's already better with regular stats, not to mention warforged versions, that won't happen with tiers) - drops that have +crit with +spirit or +crit/+mastery. Are we really choosing to drop our secondary stats (specially crit) to get the +10% haste 1/6 of every minute ??? (that IF we cast SS on cooldown, which is usually not the best way to use it)

I think I'm sticking with 2 pieces (legs being one of them) and aiming for +crit/+mastery items (reforging mastery to spirit) or +crit/+spirit items (reforgin spirit into mastery).

raskolnikovv wrote:Some more into the 4p bonus: to get it, we need to equip 4 pieces of tier armor (really?!). But none of them have +crit, and all of them have spirit, so their bonus is always spirit+mastery.

Crit scales with Mastery and you shouldn't undervalue Mastery. Take a look at HealCalc and the other forums where there have been discussions of stat weights. Mastery should likely be a few % ahead of crit. Mastery makes your crits have bigger bubbles, makes you PWS bigger, and in general all your heals bigger (which means more value when they crit). I myself gem and reforge for crit and end up in the perfect sweetspot with crit just 2-3% below mastery.

You seem under the impression that spirit shell isn't affected by mastery. You might be confused because of a patch note from long ago stating "Spirit Shell is no longer affected by mastery" which was poorly worded - the old version of spirit shell took all the healing a spell would have done on average (included the healing, DA, crits, etc) which meant it was already scaling with mastery - and then that became an absorb that was applied to the targets, which got increased AGAIN by mastery.The patchnote really just meant that that last, extra, multiplier was removed. Mastery still increases Spirit Shelled spells, but for the exact same amount as it's regular counterpart would heal.

As ApolloNik suggests, take a look at healCalc to see the real values of crit and mastery - Personally I've got my eyes on a gearset that includes 4-set and in which I can perfectly balance my crit and mastery to stay within 2-3% of the theoretical maximum. Also as a 10-man raider the chance that I get more than 1 HC WF item that I want are so minimal it just doesn't seem a valid gearing strategy during progression.

The reduction of spirit shell to 10 sec along with our current 4-pc makes a lot more sense with the announcement of 20 man mythic raiding. When spirit shell was initially reduced I thought it slightly unfair that 10 man could blanket their whole raid twice whereas 25 could blanket 4/5 of their raid once. But now I think the change to spirit shell is perfect. You'll be capable of blanketing your entire 20 man if you use spirit shell smartly - starting with borrowed time and casting during low movement. Now I think of our current 4-pc as more of a band aid until our raid size is reduced. Although I think a lot of people only aim for 4 spirit shell anyways.

I've been computing my own spreadsheet using this thread, the original post and formulas from wowpedia.org/Haste.

However, I'd like a second check on my results if anyone has time.Results were computed under python 2.7 (i can put up a sourceforge if anyone interested) and are close to Derevka's (if not considering rounding).It represents haste breakpoints for 5 to 10 casts of POH during a SS without 4pc (top) and with it with different cumulated buff.

If my results are ok I will follow up with gobs and BT consideration.

I'm not sure if I cumulated the haste% using the proper math. That should be eazy to check for you guys right? I just couldn't find the exact formula (all i got was "Haste stacks in a multiplicative manner", which is what i basicly did).

Without trying to recreate your spreadsheet, the one thing I would caution you is that the game goes out to miliseconds, it doesnt seem you are accounting for miliseconds. With that in mind, it can throw your actual Haste Rating values off due to rounding.

derevka wrote:Without trying to recreate your spreadsheet, the one thing I would caution you is that the game goes out to miliseconds, it doesnt seem you are accounting for miliseconds. With that in mind, it can throw your actual Haste Rating values off due to rounding.

Thanks :)What I basicly did was to test the formula:desired cast time = initial cast time / ( 1 + %haste/100)(taken from wowpedia.org/Haste, I know the rouding probleme is here)I did that for every single haste point from 1 to 100 000 and returned the first value that fitted a breakpoint by using the formula:number of cast = 10/cast time